“... drunk at work. Yuri Andropov, the short-lived successor to the lax (and heavy-drinking) Brezhnev, took the KGB route: harassing of drunks. Gorbachev, in his first manifestation as an idealistic back-to-Leninism leader, copied Lenin’s tactic: he banned it. This evokes a passionate denunciation from Pokhlebkin, much of it wholly justified: In the course of ...”

“... describes, in dramatic detail, one exemplary episode from several years past: an evening stroll he took through a field near Salem, Massachusetts, where many ‘supposed bewitchings’ occurred during the famous witch-hunt of 1692. ‘Alone with my thoughts and the night sounds . . . I convinced myself that I believed in Satan and all his evil works ...”

“... falling away. The Sunday Telegraph has ceased its passionate flirtations with nostalgia. Besides, John Major is either dismantling some of what she did or failing to conceal his embarrassment at the consequences of what he cannot undo. In the balance between exalting the Thatcher years and distancing itself from them, the Major Government has slowly but ...”

“... themselves perhaps only a generation or two away from the farm in Mayo or Meath. The clergy who took the boat to Liverpool were for the most part the sons of so-called strong farmers, men who owned a comfortable number of acres, in contrast to the impoverished small tenants, cottiers and farm labourers. The social background of these aspirants to the ...”

“... It is sad to know we’ve been robbed of the songs that were to come from John Lennon. He was a master of his craft and made music that was personal and unique. In partnership with Paul McCartney, and later as a solo artist, he wrote songs that have become the soundtrack of the Sixties and Seventies. He covered a wide range of subjects in his work, from the Vietnam conflict and women’s rights to his own search for peace of mind, and in doing so, he became a mirror for two generations ...”

“... serious shooting had stopped. The most notable engagement between Irish Fascists and Republicans took place in Spain, during the Civil War; even that had a comic aspect, being entirely accidental. Still, Ireland in the Thirties did seem to retain the capacity for virile action, attractive to a certain disposition, which Yeats had finely described some forty ...”

“... of Christmas from the Cuban calendar. But in Havana, I heard the extraordinary story of what John Paul II said to Fidel Castro during his audience at the Vatican late last year. The Holy Father, standing close to the President, took the opportunity to ask him why he had cancelled Christmas. The direct approach does not ...”

“... In 1936, after four years of chemistry at Vienna University, I took the train to Cambridge to seek out the Great Sage, and asked him: ‘How can I solve the riddle of life?’ ‘The riddle of life is in the structure of proteins,’ he replied, ‘and it can be solved only by X-ray crystallography.’ The Great Sage was John Desmond Bernal, a flamboyant Irishman with a mane of fair hair, crumpled flannel trousers and a tweed jacket ...”

“... by an obscure one entirely because of its associational value. A small watercolour seascape by John Constable, though unfinished, trails clouds of reflected glory from the familiar Romantic landscapes and the atmospheric intensity of his big ‘six-footer’ canvases. If, however, paper analysis reveals it to be a work of the 1840s, probably by ...”

“... made Catharine Macaulay. Partly through her husband’s interests, and partly because her brother, John Sawbridge, was a radical City MP and alderman, she was drawn into the company of the so-called Real Whigs, dissenting intellectuals like Thomas Hollis, Richard Barron, Sylas Neville and Caleb Fleming. She also met and initially admired ...”

“... was printed anonymously in an April 1709 edition of the Tatler, which in its original incarnation took an interest in literary criticism, history and philosophy as well as society gossip. Richard Steele, the magazine’s editor and a friend of Swift’s, puffed the poet and his work in an introduction. This new writer, he said, deserved to be read and admired ...”

“... of them was that the Church bought out its partners at an early stage and at a generous price. Sir John Hall, the Newcastle entrepreneur, was bought out of the Gateshead Metro shopping centre before it was built. He got £40m, but the Church kept losing money on the project until it was finally sold at a staggering loss in 1990. Sir ...”

“... If Robespierre could have read the second volume of John Ehrman’s massive biography of Pitt it would have saved him a good deal of worry. The two men had more in common than might appear at first sight, or than either of them would have cared to admit. Each was a decidedly cold fish, a bachelor of that alarming species that lives only for politics ...”

“... I go downstairs and through the gap in the wall I made, the Caledonian Gap, into my studio. It took me many years to be able to call the room I worked in a studio: the word seemed so pretentious for what was designed as the first-floor front bedroom. I do my post – about four letters a day – and phone calls, one every day to my confidant Martin ...”

“... was ‘always dirty and smelt’. This diary is also a love story: ‘The sun was shining and Alan took my hand.’ Eva Taylor considers her husband ‘cleverer than Macaulay’, whose works he reads to her, along with Gulliver’s Travels and The Diary of a Nobody. What A.J.P. Taylor needs, she says, is an intellectual woman ‘who adores him’. He has found ...”